gloria
by Empatheia
Summary: -Raven x Rita- In the middle of the night somewhere on the Ilycchian continent, they finally reach the breaking point and tell each other the truth. Spoilers for Raven's past.


**A/N: **Written for NaNoWriMo, since I'm cheating and just writing a bunch of little fics rather than one long story. :P

The _my heart beats only for you_ line is from Twilight. It's hard to explain why it's in here, suffice to say that it involves a long MSN chat with a friend and a challenge.

**Warnings:** Rita is not aged up for this. Also, this contains spoilers for Raven's past.

Enjoy!

**xxxxx**

_**gloria**_

**xxxxx**

_we lied, we can't go on_

_this is the time and this is the place_

_to be alive_

Raven doesn't believe the gods exist, but every once in a while wishes they did so he could ask them a question or two.

Right now, his question is this: is it still possible to sin after one has died?

It seems a strange dilemma to have, for a soldier. Since when are soldiers even supposed to care about things like sin? The only evil is disloyalty, and he's already been through that one six ways from Sunday. If there is a hell like the misery addicts moaning and shrieking on street corners proclaim there is, he's already going there.

So, does it matter? Does anyone care? Does i_he_ care?

It's stupid and masochistic, but yes, he cares. This wouldn't be the mess it is, or anything at all for that matter, if he didn't.

xxxxx

_People say stupid things when they're drunk._

_He wasn't drunk, though, not exactly. Or maybe he was, just not on alcohol. The first breath of life after death, the taste of a wind you never thought you'd get to taste again... it's heady stuff. Could set any man's head spinning._

_Everything felt surreal. The cold stone under his hands and knees, slightly wet and stinking of dungeon mildew. The unsteady darkness of the ceiling above his head. The red glow that filled the space between. The harsh rasp of his own breath in his ears, and the unfamiliar burn in his chest where the sword had broken two of his ribs and slammed into his heart going almost too fast to see._

_So he wasn't drunk. He was just glad to be alive, if he could call that._

_"Say it again," said Alexei, his voice a peculiar mix between triumph and greed. _

_Raven shook his head-- to clear it, not to refuse, but got a dagger hilt to the face anyway because Alexei was a bastard and a half. His fingers, touched to his cheek, came away cold and coated with dark wetness. _

_"Say it."_

_He opens his mouth, breath unsteady and rattling in his throat like he's dying all over again, and keeps his gaze carefully on the floor so as not to get the dagger again. Damn thing hurt like hell. "My heart... beats only for you."_

_Alexei sheathed the dagger and made a pleased sound, braced his bare hands on his armoured hips. "Damn right it does. Do not forget that."_

_Raven won't. Someday he'll make Alexei eat those words. He'll write them down, tie them around an arrow, light it on fire, and serve it right back down that smug throat. Someday when he wasn't to weak to spit and unarmed besides._

_For now he was just grateful to be alive._

xxxxx

She's innocent, but also not.

He spends many hours after dark staring at the campfire trying to figure out how the hell that works and doesn't really get much of anywhere.

It's like... she's only lived for fifteen years. It's such a small number. What can you see in fifteen years? What can you do? Well, it seems if you're Rita Mordio, the answer is _plenty_. When he'd posed the question to her a few days back, she'd stomped on his foot and reminded him that fifteen years is five and a half thousand days, which is a much bigger and more impressive number.

A day is a long time. You can see a lot in a day. Especially if you're Rita Mordio and have well-developed powers of observation.

There's a sort of brash naiveté to her, but when it comes down to the ugly crunch she doesn't panic. She gets angry, but then she does what needs to be done. There are many kinds of wisdom, after all. She may not have the one that comes from experience just yet, but there is an innate sort as well which she possesses in spades. She was born wise.

It doesn't make it any less a sin for him to want her.

He's not immortal, and what if he's wrong about what comes after? He's burning now, but what if giving in means he'll burn forever?

A few more days of this, and he'll be past caring.

xxxxx

Once again, he's underestimated her.

It's not clear yet whether she's angry or frightened or something else entirely, but she's inches away and he can't move a muscle within the prison of stone she's made for him. At least she's pinned him to the wall upright. It could be worse. She could have used fire.

"So, little unclear here on what's going on," he says lightly, trying to make a joke out of it, but it's the coldest, strangest hour of the morning so it just falls flat. It's not funny and they both know it.

Her face is pinched and narrow. He can see her hands shaking at her sides. It must have taken a lot of guts to make the decision to finally confront him about this. "Tell me the truth, old man," she says, "I deserve that much."

If he could move his shoulders, he would shrug, but he can't so instead he tilts his head a bit and searches for an appropriately quizzical expression. "The truth about what, Rita darlin'? It's a bit late-- early-- to be so vague when talking to a fogy like me."

"Drop it," she snaps. "Be serious for once in your stupid life and tell me-- augh. I don't even know why I'm bothering with this. It's not worth it."

That hurts. Enough to make him drop his fake face and really look at her, meet her eyes as a man rather than as a mask of one. "You're right about that," he says softly, though that just makes it hurt more.

She narrows her eyes at him and he knows instantly that he's said the wrong thing. If he wanted to make her give up on this, he should have lied and lied. The taste of truth whets her appetite for more, it always has and he should have known better.

"No. Enough. Enough. Just... tell me what it means when you look at me like that, and I'll leave you alone, I swear. I've half a mind to never talk to you again. Just tell me this. I have to know. It's driving me nuts."

"In what way?" he asks, meaning for it to come out flip and facetious. Instead it comes out raw and sexual and damn it, damn it, damn it, he hadn't meant to say it. Not like this. He closes his eyes and lets his head fall backwards, bile rising in his throat as he waits. He swallows hard. It doesn't help.

On the bright side, though, maybe she'll kill him for it and get it over with at long last. It's not like he can think of any possible better way to go than crushed to oblivion by the woman-- girl-- woman-- he loves.

"You--" she starts, then cuts herself off, her fists white-knuckled at her sides. "Is that it?" she says, low and lethal and angrier than he's ever heard her. She runs hot, usually, her anger tending towards screaming and hitting and throwing fireballs at anyone within reach. But this time she's freezing, sharper and deadlier than any flame she's ever summoned up.

He wonders what it says about him that her being icily homicidal turns him on. Unable to help himself, he grins and lowers his head to smile at her, not bothering to hide a single thing. It's not like there's any point anymore. She has him one angry flick of her scarf from real, permanent death, and he can't even bring himself to care. Having it all out in the open like this... he could say it's a relief, but that's not quite it, not quite big enough.

It feels like freedom. There's nothing more he can do to lose her.

He's always wanted to go out smiling.

"Raven Schwann Oltorain," she says, "you are an idiot."

The stones melt away into dust on the ground, and he discovers to his faraway surprise that they were all that was holding him up. Boneless, he falls to his hands and knees at her feet, and can't find the strength to look up and find out what the future looks like.

Once again, she takes the decision out of his hands, walking around beside him and using one booted foot to kick him over onto his back. He goes without a fuss. It hardly even hurts at all through the blanket of numbness that's descended over his senses.

The numbness goes away very quickly when she steps over his prone body and abruptly sits down on his belly. His eyes bug out and he tries to turn over and retch, but she puts her hands on his shoulders and slams him flat with surprising strength. Somehow he always forgets that though she's primarily a magic user, she's still a fighter. Even if she wasn't he'd still be helpless before her, he knows, but pretends he doesn't.

"Raven Schwann Oltorain," she says again, punctuating each syllable of his name with a sharp shake of his shoulders, "you are the biggest idiot in the world entire world. There has never been an idiot big enough to even compare to you. Every little idiot in the world probably wants to be you when they grow up, and you make all the old idiots nostalgic for the good old days. How are you so stupid? Honestly? Tell me, I want to know."

Baffled, speechless, and in considerable pain, he can only stare up at her impressively contorted face and try to ignore the fact that she's sitting on him in a most perilous position. "I-- uh," he stutters.

"You love me," she states. It's a challenge, but when he looks closer he sees that there's something else there too, something infinitely more fragile.

He sighs. "Yeah."

She freezes. He actually hears her breath catch in her throat and stop, and feels her whole body go tense and rigid above him. "You love me," she whispers, her entire face a mask of shock and wonder and... something else.

That something has a name, but he's far too terrified even to think it in case he's wrong.

As it turns out, he's not.

"You," she hisses, "are really, really fucking stupid."

And then she leans right down, her hands planted in the dirt beside his head, and kisses him. Messy, unpracticed, harsh, but it's there and it's an answer better than any he's ever dared to hope for.

"Why didn't you say anything?" she yells as she pulls away, the words slamming into his face like stones as she puts a little magic behind it. "You moron!"

"You're a child," he tells her honestly. "I--"

She punches him in the face. With her left hand, he notices, not her dominant one. It still hurts but at least there's that.

"I'm too old for you," he continues.

This time she uses her right. He sees stars for many long seconds before he can shake himself out of it and see straight again. The first thing he notices when his eyes clear is that she's crying. He gives his head a few more shakes since obviously he's not seeing as straight as he thought he was.

"I'm an old man, living on stolen time. You can do so much better--"

"Blah, blah, blah," she interrupts. "Seriously, shut up. How often did you rehearse this speech to your reflection, you loser? All I'm hearing here is 'excuse, excuse, I suck, excuse.' You've got to do better than that."

He gapes. "I... uh."

"Give me one good reason."

"I just did!" he protests, then flinches. "Please don't hit me again. I like my face."

On any other day, he could think of a thousand good reasons, but they all seem to have abandoned ship when it started raining Rita. Right this second he can't think of a single one. He can't seem to bring himself to be worried about it, either.

"No, that was a dumb reason. Unless I missed something really major in my studies and people turn into different species as they age, you're still human, right? You're just a person. I'm a person, too. So... I'm not seeing what the big deal is, here."

"That's why you're still a child," he whispers. Before she can punch him again, he frees his arms from between her knees and his sides, reaches up to catch her face between his hands, and pulls her down. Not to kiss her, though there's almost nothing he wants to do more. Almost nothing except this.

Her breath comes quick and startled against his neck. He threads his fingers through her hair and just holds her there, sprawled against his chest, limbs akimbo. The rhythm of her heart thunders against the cold metal where his should be. She's so much warmer than him.

"I-I'm not a child," she stutters into his ear. "Stop saying that."

Letting her go, he pushes them both up to a sitting position, legs all tangled together and faces bare inches apart. "Yeah, you are."

Rita's expression darkens angrily. "No, I'm not! I haven't been a child since-- I've been alone for a really long time time, and I've been just fine. I fed myself and clothed myself and studied and made a name for myself, and nobody ever helped me. I built my life all by myself, and it's a good one, so just... shut up. Shut up. Please shut up."

Holding himself back all this time had hurt. Telling her in all the wrong ways and realizing it too late had hurt too. It had hurt a whole lot when she'd punched him. Those little pains, though, were nothing next to this. If he'd still had a real heart, it would be breaking.

"Rita, I'm not--"

Ignoring his attempted interruption, she barrels onwards, the tears streaming freely now into the darkness between them. "And besides, if I'm such a kid, why did you kiss me back? Doesn't that make you--"

"Yeah," he cuts in. "Yeah, it does make me exactly the freak I think I am. Look, I wasn't insulting you by calling you that. I was warning you. No matter how I think of you, every single other person in the world looks at you and sees a fifteen year old girl, and looks at me and sees a thirty-odd year old man. No matter what I see or you see, they won't care."

She stares at him. "You're... even stupider than I thought. Incredible. I didn't think it was possible. Old man-- Raven, who are all these people you're jabbering about? Random jerks on the street? Why do you care what they think? You're _dead,_ you have the perfect excuse not to care, and they're just random jerks."

Thunderstruck, he realizes that she's right. It's true that by all conventional laws and wisdom he's wrong and sick for this, it's true that the world will blindly disapprove, but it's not the world he wants to be with: it's Rita. And Rita doesn't seem to care one whit

about any of that.

"I-- huh," he says, amazed.

She prods a finger into his chest sharply. "You listen to me. I may be just a kid, but obviously I'm a lot smarter than you, so just be quiet and listen up. I've never let adults tell me what to think. I look at the facts and make up my own damn mind. The facts in this case are this: one, you love me. Two, it would seem that I love you back, which is astonishing and will require extensive investigation in the future, but at the present will just have to stand as a self-evident conclusion. Three--"

A smile spreading across his face, he leans forward and cuts off whatever three was going to be with the lightest possible touch of his lips against hers. She stops dead in her verbal tracks, eyes springing wide for a moment before slamming shut and she leans in and kisses him back, harder and much more demanding than before. Her hands come up to cup his face, her callused palms sliding against his ever-present stubble, fingertips digging into his cheekbones.

Hesitant at first, hardly daring to believe that she's isn't just playing an impossibly cruel joke and isn't just about to blast him into ash, he curls his arms around her tiny frame and slides his broad palms up her back. She arches against him, sucking the breath right out of his throat with a gasp, and he slowly begins to let himself believe.

A tugging at his scalp-- Rita is pulling out the leather thong that holds his hair up so she can run her fingers through it, dragging it down to curl around his ears and the line of his jaw. It feels strange because this is how he wears it when he's a soldier. It's as though she's intentionally rubbing out the line demarcating the great conflict of his soul, blurring the broken bits of him together into a messy but united whole. Perhaps that's melodramatic but then everything seems melodramatic in this moment, more sentimentally significant than it should really be.

Breaking away momentarily, he slides down to press his face into the crook of her neck, breathing deep and laying kisses everywhere he can reach-- the spot beneath her ear, which makes her twitch... the thin stretch where her neck meets her shoulder, which makes her gasp and clutch at him like she's drowning. And maybe she is. God knows _he_ is... if there is a god, and he's inclined right now to wonder if maybe he was wrong about that after all. He follows the line of her throat back up, tilting her head back with hands tightly wound in her hair so he can kiss the underside of her chin.

A memory comes to him, then, old and bittersweet. All he can think to do with it is offer it up to her as a gift, and so he does.

"My heart beats only for you," he whispers into the shell of ear.

"You are so lame," she snorts back, endearingly clueless about the history of those words, and just like that steals the last remaining bit of him Alexei still held back for herself.

He smiles and tastes freedom on her skin.

**XxxxxX**

**A/N:** My Rita is so violent. Sigh.

Ridiculous sequel will follow at some point and will involve everyone making out with basically everyone else because how else am I supposed to write 50,000 words before the end of the month?


End file.
